No pilot?

[sftrabbit]

I admit this is a bit of a weird question, but it's just something I thought I should find out. Honestly, I don't really know much about aviation but I am interested in it nonetheless.

Okay... so on a commercial airline plane which is cruising mid-flight to its destination, what would happen if the pilot (and everybody else on board) were to suddenly disappear or just stop controlling the plane? If it was on auto-pilot would it just continue to fly? Where to? Can auto-pilot even land a plane? How about if it wasn't on auto-pilot? Would safety systems kick in and turn it on? Is there any circumstance in which the plane would crash because of this?

Thanks in advance for reading/answering. xD

[BOAC]

Google 'Helios+Crash'

[11Fan]

If: the pilot (and everybody else on board) were to suddenly disappear

Then: the plane would crash

[Intruder]

The pilots have to put the autopilot in approach mode and lower the flaps and landing gear. So, the airplane could not land itself.

[sftrabbit]

Thanks for the feedback. BOAC, I've found lots of useful information from reading about that incident, thanks.

[Cacophonix]

One wonders when commercial flights will be conducted remotely in the same way as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles? A thought for another technical thread perhaps?

[gengis]

One wonders when commercial flights will be conducted remotely in the same way as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles?

Not for a very very long time. As of the present, they can't even guarantee a 100% datalink connection for CPDLC/ADS comms throughout the entirety of a flight on any single airplane, let alone controlling 30 thousand plus airplanes at any one time from start-up through to landing - something which would require multiple levels of redundancy of secure dedicated discreet datalinks for each individual airplane. It's not gonna happen for a long time yet..

[Intruder]

UAV mishap rate is staggering -- about half the UAVs produced for the US military have already crashed.

[con-pilot]

UAV mishap rate is staggering -- about half the UAVs produced for the US military have already crashed.

From what I understand early in the program they had the wrong type people 'flying' the UAVs. Now they have more experienced pilots 'flying' them and the current accident rate, while still too high compared to manned aircraft, is much lower.

Then again, I could have been lied to.

[Dani]

There would be a possibility of a fully automatic landing: Shortly before dying, pilots would need to


perfectly program the FMS/FMGC
Arm Land/ILS
Lower gear (or not, then it would be a crash landing)
select autobrake (or not, then it would roll over the runway end)

[bfisk]

If everyone on board disappears, how does it even matter what the plane does? :confused:

[parabellum]

NamibFox - It ain't gonna happen!!! Apart from the technical aspect as described by Gengis, above, there is the security aspect. The prospect of ground control falling into the wrong hands does not bear thinking about, be it taken over military style or taken over using more powerful ground control systems.

(By the time all the system redundancy equipment is loaded on you may as well have pilots, they eat more, weigh less and cost less!).

[Jofm5]

To those that know of the TV Program "Top Gear" clarkson asked the very question to the audience as to who would get on a fully automated plane with no pilot on board - nobody would (this was during a discussion on fully automated cars).

I think the technical challenges could be overcome with the technology we already have - as Gengis points out communications redundency would be required but even without comms there could be a "safer" revert programmed. We have drones already in the military after all...

The bigger issue I think would be who would actually willingly get onto such an aircraft knowing that there is no pilot on board - it would take a complete re-education of the populous into placing our trust in such a aircraft as we like the console ourselves in the comfort that the guys up the front dont want to crash either (no matter how safer automation may be statistically).

Back to the original thread point - IIRC research was comissioned into introducing remote control/landing capabilities on airliners - not due to the Helios incident but after 9/11 to be able to take over control in Hi-jack situations. I am not sure if anything ever came of that but I recall reading somewhere they were exploring the possibilities.

[GlueBall]

Obviously the technology for unmanned airplanes is available, as demonstrated by military UAV operations. But it's ok only as long as everything works.

The problem is when something breaks: Computer snafu, engine failure, hydraulic leak, . . . For that reason it's questionable if any passenger would trust the automatics and get aboard.

[muduckace]

Minus a few inputs such as flight spoiler, flap/slat setting, gear control, autobrake selection and thrust reverser deployment today's aircraft land in automation. Taxying to the desired gate is also a human function.

Recently we have created a system known as FANS "future air navigation system". FANS is sold as a system to text high altitude reporting commands to avoid mis-communication over forign land, this system could simply be modified to control an aircraft in flight via FMS commands to Flight Control Systems.

The simple imputs listed above would be easy to automate, the only limitations are FAA/JAR, etc. restrictions to pilotless commercial aircraft, the military operates "drones" as we speak, the only limitation we have to a commercial aircraft operating without a PIC is the liability and blame of loss of life as a result of a crash and loss of life.

[Jimmy Do Little]

the pilot (and everybody else on board) were to suddenly disappear

Follow the signs to the "Transporter Room" and prepare to "Beam Down" to where-ever Kirk, Spock and the rest of passengers went.

[Agaricus bisporus]

Well, a F8 Crusader managed it whan the stude banged out on take off and the thing promptly landed itself and trapped the wires at the far threshold, (from the book "MiG Master", I think.)

So it can happen.

[The SSK]

It's got nothing to do with thh technology, nor security.

Why would it happen anyway? One reason only - to save costs. But the development and certification cost would be ten times bigger than huge. In any case, the aircraft would be 'piloted', but by somebody on the ground. So you might be saving hotel bills, but not salaries.

And anyway, who would choose to fly in a pilotless airliner anyway, when presumably there would be plenty of traditionally-piloted alternatives? Would you have confidence in a Michael O'Leary of the future announcing that - in order to give you the cheapest fare possible - he was doing away with the ultimate 'frill'?

[Cacophonix]

I certainly would not get into a pilotless plane as the technology stands. I agree that the current cost of certification would be enormous. Still, if one had mentioned the possibility of Cat III C landing systems to pilots before the second world war, they might have said that automatic landings would not happen either!

[Admiral346]

There would be a possibility of a fully automatic landing: Shortly before dying, pilots would need to

perfectly program the FMS/FMGC
Arm Land/ILS
Lower gear (or not, then it would be a crash landing)
select autobrake (or not, then it would roll over the runway end)

Complete nonsense!

ad 1) now that can be done

ad2) arming the ILS (I assume you mean arming approach mode) gives authority to the nav recievers - any beam of the preselected freq would cause the aircraft to turn or go up/down. Don't ever try it in real life. One of my instructors on the A320 did it, thinking the plane would fly FMS to destination and the intercept the ILS by itself - well, he told me he was barely able to save the plane from going into a high speed stall when the thing recieved something at high level.

ad 3) I truely don't know what would happen if you lowered the gear at FL 350 doing M .80 - the doors will be gone, for sure! Then the transsonic aerodynamics - I'd say it will be interessting!

ad 4) You will overrun depending on design of the autobrake - all the ones I know will switch off at slow speeds when antiskid becomes unavailable (around 20kts)...

Dream on boy-
No pilots = certain death!

Nic

[p7lot]

I have been trying really hard to think of a situation where all flight deck and crew would "disappear".
Maybe the answer would be as silly as the question.
And albeit semantics, but the crew of the Helios were unconsious...not absent.

[Dani]

Admiral, I admit that you couldn't do it in every phase of flight... :ugh:

Next will be you say that it's also not possible before take-off!

You have to be close to your destination of course. And you will overrun even with autobrake max but it will be with minimum speed. But everyone will be unharmed.

Dani

[Microburst2002]

If M Oleary has wet dreams...

Well, that is the most wet of all, I am sure!
Can you imagine? You get in an airplane in the UK. You think that some UK formed remote pilot will remote fly it. OK.
But no! He is a Mumbai slave-remote-pilot formed in all forms of remote slavery, who started his career in a call centre. (At this point, M.O. is in furious R.E.M)

[gengis]

Don't worry about it. All that FANS b-s that someone wrote about is totally inadequate and insufficiently reliable. To have half a chance for this to work requires failsafe dedicated & discreet datalinks for every airplane. Using FANS as it is to try to operate an airplane remotely from the ground, there'll be a crash every week due to loss of datalink. How many times have you been on CPDLC/ADS and then got "SATCOM", "SATCOM DATA", "DATALINK LOST", "DATALINK SYS"....???

For ATC comms, this is acceptable because you just revert to secondary communications. For flight control it is woefully short. Not only has the datalink got to be totally reliable from start-up to shut-down, it has to be discreet for each individual airplane flying. To control a UAV over Afghanistan by remote control from the US is a different matter as you only have a handful to worry about. Current estimates put the number of commercial airplane traffic at 30,000 plus per day - that means 30,000 plus failsafe datalinks under worst case scenarios. Anyone who thinks this is gonna happen anytime soon is engaging in wishful thinking. But then, dreaming is free....

[Admiral346]

MICROBURST,

good one!!!

Just like Homer Simpson's nuclear power plant getting outsorced, if you ever saw that episode...

Nic

[Denti]

ad 3) I truely don't know what would happen if you lowered the gear at FL 350 doing M .80 - the doors will be gone, for sure! Then the transsonic aerodynamics - I'd say it will be interessting!


Why? gear extension speed is 270/.82 and no altitude limit, once exted its 320/.82

All is type depended i guess, you could use GBAS instead of ILS for example, harder to confuse the flight computers that way :)

[dazdaz]

Quite a number of posts are suggesting, and going down the thought process of a data link to the a/c and some person on the ground remotely guiding/flying the a/c.

I think the real question, is it possible for (on board) software alone to control an a/c from a to b?

[parabellum]

dazdaz - Possibly, but if the software for the flight was fully self contained then how would the aircraft be able to cope with en route changes? Just simple weather avoidance would be a problem, as would level changes for conflicting traffic, taking up the hold when stacking for arrival and so the list goes on.

Despite being dismissed as a factor by a previous poster I still maintain that security will always be the biggest obstacle. Lunatic terrorists taking over a ground control station, by any means, could bring unmanned aviation to a stand-still over night.

[Microburst2002]

REST:
I am afraid that if they do an effort, they will overcome any obstacles, invent new systems, methods, redundancies, combined remote control and self contained systems...
Imagine an airplane that is transfered from one air traffic controller/remote pilot to another. In the event of loss of comm, TCAS will intervene. If WX ahead this can be done in a similar way.
All this research can be very expensive, let alone implementing it. But still the greedy bastards in the industry may calculate that they will have benefits in the long term, if they manage to put us out of the cockpits.

ADMIRAL346
HAHA, You mean the episode when the germans buy the nuclear plant and Homer stars dreaming of "chocolateland" in the middle of a "explain your job" interview?
hmmmm.... Chocolate!

[gengis]

REST:
I am afraid that if they do an effort, they will overcome any obstacles, invent new systems, methods, redundancies, combined remote control and self contained systems...
Imagine an airplane that is transfered from one air traffic controller/remote pilot to another. In the event of loss of comm, TCAS will intervene. If WX ahead this can be done in a similar way.
All this research can be very expensive, let alone implementing it. But still the greedy bastards in the industry may calculate that they will have benefits in the long term, if they manage to put us out of the cockpits.


Microburst, no doubt that it can be done. But on a very small scale. By the time this is accomplished on a scale large enough to encompass the majority of the world's civil air traffic we'll all be retired.

Take FANS for example. This is something that has been on the cards since the early 90s - a good 15-years down the road before a workable system is in place (CNS - CPDLC/RNP/ADS...). Something that much more complicated as dedicated flight control inputs via remote control on a very large scale for that matter.... you just do the maths. Quite possibly our children might have made it to Senior Capt when it happens. Relax...

[gianmarko]

for sure remote controlled aircrafts would have one advantage: in case of accident, a radio interference or a passenger cellphone would invariably be blamed :p

[Microburst2002]

Gengis
I hope your are right. I hope I will never see pilotless transport airplanes.

[crippen]

No Pilot? Answer No Me on board! Don't even like the Dockland Light Railway in London. No drivers on train,one dimension travel,about 20 mph !Managed to have 3 or 4 accidents. No way in the air!:=:\

[gengis]

Microburst:

I stand corrected with the numbers. According to the link below, total worldwide traffic movements for 2007 was 73,864,874. That very roughly equates to 200,000 air traffic movements PER DAY, not 30,000 as previously postulated. Given that not all of this is commercial airline traffic, it still illustrates the number of air traffic movements concerned.

Someone brought up the point that the question should be whether the Autopilots could do the job from start-up to landing, rather than flight control from the ground via datalink. Even if it were (and it is likely that the technology to do it is not far away), that alone, IMHO, can never be adequate. Autopilots frequently require intervention - be it route modifications, weather deviations etc. Without a pilot, the only conceivable other form of control of the automatics has to be ground control via failsafe datalinks. Imagine 200,000+ per day - none of which may be allowed to drop off line for whatever reason.

One other point that is worthy of mention - it is not just "normal" flight control by datalink that needs to be taken care of; any such "automated" system will also need to handle non-normal/emergency procedures as well. Plus, in-flight decision making? Uncontrolled engine fire midway over the Pacific? Or combination of separate unrelated on-board system failures? (Don't say it can't happen - we all know that it can). If the automatics cant' handle it, or require intervention of some sort (read "help") and there is no pilot then only ground control via datalink remains. And for this very reason this has got to be 100% failsafe under worst case conditions & cannot EVER be allowed to fail. Imagine 200,000+ of these at the very least?????

Print Preview : Banner year for international traffic - {Travel Daily News} (http://www.traveldailynews.com/pages/print/25013)

[p7lot]

Quote:
"You clearly know absolutely nothing about the true reasons for this crash - why post stuff that you a) don't know the facts of, and b) is completely wrong?"

I conceed the youtube clip was in bad taste and has been removed.
I was trying to emphasise the consequences of pilotless flight ....
obviously in such poor taste I wear the official pprne pariah t shirt.

[Hunter58]

I know that some airline bosses dream of the pilotless aircraft, mainly to avoid union discussions I suppose. From what I gather most engineers in the aircraft manufacturers are NOT hot about the idea at all. The reason is simple. While many people are very fast to cite statistics and the 'human factor' in accidents and a potential improvement in accident statistics with pilotless aircraft the manufacturers on the other hand know at least part of the statistics that is missing. They have a faint idea of how many times those by now two biological computers up front have not failed but SAVED the day. The reason why they only have a faint idea is that most of the times the saving went unreported becasue it was 'normal'.

I know it is a PPRuNe fixation that at least one manufacturer is trying to keep the pilots out of the loop, but the reality is quite different.

[parabellum]

gengis, I really like your reasoning and I believe it 100%, technically the pilot less aircraft is still generations away and that puts my security argument left smoldering off stage, ready to pounce when the technology problems have been solved to the extent that passengers are happy to fly on a pilot less aircraft, I personally believe it will never happen in our world.

[itsresidualmate]

I'd hazard a guess that when the pilotless airliner comes out, it'll be a freighter. Once it's flown for many years with with an acceptably low amount of smoking holes in farmer's fields, the passenger one will get wheeled out.

Maybe the pilot will be replaced by an engineer.....?!! :)

[gianmarko]

i don't think we will live long enough to see pilotless freighters or passenger liners.
the insurance of my 2 seater is higher than the one of my sportscar. the insurance of my 4 seater is way more than a SUV. statistically the chances that i will kill someone going down with my airplane is close to zero, while the chance i can take out some pedestrian is very high. does it make sense? not a tiny bit, but our agencies are terrified at the though of me flying a small plane, but yawn if i drive a 8 seats, 3 metric tons, 500hp SUV. i dont see any aviation authority ever certifying a liner for pilotless operation. even single pilot operation is out of the question, so far.

[Denti]

Airbus is going to try to achieve single pilot cruise certificaton with its A350. Which is going to be interesting to say the least.

[Brian Abraham]

Son: Dad, why do airliners always have two pilots?

Dad: One has to prevent the other from doing stupid things

Son: Which one is doing the stupid things?

[Ancient Observer]

Given that EASA will have first go at "single pilot cruise certificaton", and given they they know less about that subject than Airbus, how would EASA deal with it? Have they actually got any test pilots yet? (Other than the usual bunch of Air france boys and girls "seconded")

[Microburst2002]

Denti
are you sure?
When I read it I first thought it was a joke.
But somehow it makes sense.
In the early days, airplanes had up to 5 guys in the cockpit (pilot, copilot, engineer, RTF officer and navigation officer). And now we have only pilot, copilot.
So why not just pilot?
They would save a lot of money.
They can put one pilot and one... "assistant pilot"? or "airplane systems supervisor"? or just a pilot and a flight engineer!

Denti, your were kidding, weren't you?

[Clandestino]

why not just pilot?

Because the loss of redundancy would be much greater than when F/E, navigator and radio operator were lost. FWIW some airlines allow one of the pilots to take a nap during cruise, but usually there has to be a CC on the deck to ensure that the other pilot doesn't nod off too.

Provided that the rumor about A350 is true, Airbus has no chance of making it unless some certifying authority makes a colossal mistake.

[kenhughes]

I'm with crippen - that Dockland Light Railway used to scare the bejeezus out of me.

I remember seeing a Panorama program many years ago, when UK TV was still black and white. They were doing a story on the Comet or Trident and the typical BEA/BOAC pilot (white handle-bar moustache etc), was asked if planes would ever be able to fly themselves - sans pilot.

"They could do that now", he replied, "but the travelling public wouldn't accept it". How right he was.

Now if they ever trained monkies to steer it to the runway and press the 'Go' button...